This is my reply to a podcast by J. Warner Wallace entitled
In this blast from the past, J. Warner responds to a common objection to the nature of God: If God is all-loving, why doesn’t he “reform” people rather than simply “punish” them in Hell? How would you answer a skeptic who argues a God who simply punishes his children in Hell is sadistic and vengeful, unworthy of our worship? J. Warner responds to this objection and answers listener email related to the nature of “election”, and the evidence for “annihilationism.”
Wallace begins the podcast with intro music and intro speech that indicate he wants to the the center of attention. And I've been accusing him of being the Arnie's Used Car Salesman of Christianity for years.
The intro also says one purpose of the podcast is to "engage" skeptics with the Christian world view, so my Christian readers should note the day i posted this rebuttal, and start counting the days, weeks, months and years that Wallace will let my rebuttal go by before he decides to live up to his promise to "engage" this skeptic.
At 4:30, Wallace invites the listener to come to his "blog", and says he would "love" to have the listener come over and join that conversation, but when one presses the "comment" button to comment on one his articles, one is taken to his Facebook page...and despite my never having violated any of Wallace's Facebook rules or Facebook's own rules, Wallace banned me several months ago from his Facebook page.
So I continue standing by my accusation that Wallace is a liar: he says he wants to "engage" skeptics, and yet despite my never having violated any rules of conduct from Wallace or such rules required by Facebook itself, he still banned me, rather quietly, from his Facebook "blog", several months ago. Wallace is thus a liar; when he says he would love to have the listener join his blog conversations, the unstated caveat is that you not know enough to substantially refute his beliefs. Nothing spells "fake Christian employing typical materialistic political marketing strategy" quite like "let's ban our more informed critics, that will prevent potential customers from being dissauded from buying our product.".
And indeed, when one goes to Wallace's websites, one would think he is some ridiculous liberal who thinks God wasn't able to get His act together until Wallace began teaching Christians how to have a forensic faith. It is not an exaggeration to say Wallace promotes his materials so relentlessly, he is making his apologetics fantasy more the center of attention than Jesus precisely because of his marketing pitch that you cannot really live up to what Jesus wants you to do without having the forensic faith that comes from purchasing Wallace's materials.
If Wallace is correct that the bible is the inerrant word of God, "sufficient" for faith and practice, then why does he so relentlessly promote, market and advertise his own opinions about what the bible means? Why market so obstinately that today's Christians "need" his books? If the Holy Spirit doesn't need his help, why does Wallace make it seem that he and the Holy Spirit entered a mutually beneficial marketing contract?
If we are correct to ask 1990's televangelists whether they think God cannot be activated until the evangelist recieves donations, aren't we correct to ask the same type of question of other Christians who use similar marketing gimmicks? Sure, Wallace doesn't tell others to send in their last grocery money, but that hardly means he must be employing any more honest of a marketing ploy. He still drowns himself in relentless ceaseless promotion of himself, and his books, and this degree of "look at me!!!" is not consistent with Wallace's alleged trust that the Holy Spirit doesn't need his help and that the bible is ALONE "sufficient' for faith and practice.
Basically, the first 10 minutes of this podcast justifies more the interpretation that Wallace's first priority is Wallace, than the interpretation that Wallace's first priority is Jesus.
Wallace is never going to make God look good, no matter what excuses he puts forth to "explain" how a literal hell can be consistent with divine "love", because of one bible passage that I've been using to beat fundamentalists senseless for years, and they haven't moved even one single inch toward making this sadistic lunatic look "good", probably because common sense prevails over their theological delusions:
NAU Deuteronomy 28:
1 "Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the LORD your God, being careful to do all His commandments which I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth.
2 "All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the LORD your God:
15 "But it shall come about, if you do not obey the LORD your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
16 "Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country.
30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
41 "You shall have sons and daughters but they will not be yours, for they will go into captivity.
53 "Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.
63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it.
Notice, the bible teaches not only that God's curses will cause men to rape women (v. 30) children to be kidnapped by sick-minded pagans (v. 41), parents to cannibalize their own children (v. 53), but that God would be just as "delighted" to cause these curses to happen, as he is "delighted" to give prosperity to those who obey him (v. 63).
One fundamentalist breathed an ill-advised sigh of relieft by pointing out that nothing in the context indicates that God said this, it was only Moses doing the speaking.
I asked him which other statements Moses made about God, that this fundamentalist thinks are wrong. He disappeared.
I can at least buy the notion that God hurts his kids in an effort to punish them or teach them, even if we today are enlightened and know that kids don't need to be abused to be disciplined.
What I cannot buy is that a god can be "good" while "delighting" to cause women who disobey the 10 commandments, to be raped. Worse, v. 63 intentionally defines God's delight in inflicting such curses, as being the same type of "delight" he has to prosper those who obey him. So if you think God is gleeful, happy and cheerful to grant you prosperity, you cannot subtract those emotions from him when you speak about him causing rape, kidnapping and parental cannibalism.
When you think of an ancient Hebrew woman being raped, you didn't envision God standing next to her and "delighting" to watch it, until just now, did you!
God's "delight" to cause rape rationally warrants the atheist to say "fuck you" to your bible religion and do more productive things like smashing beer cans on his forehead.
Who would you rather have babysit your kids? Some spiritually dead dork who smashes beer cans on his head?
Or some bible-believing inerrantist who seriously thinks there are times when it can be good and moral to be happy cheerful and "delighted" to cause women to be raped, children to be kidnapped and parents to eat their kids?
Tough question, eh? You need to weigh your pride against the obvious stupidity of allowing sadistic lunatics to babysit your kids, you cannot just suddenly give up your faith of 30 years, can you?
Go ahead, check all the Christian commentaries you please. Let me know when you find exegetical and contextual argument that God's "delight" in v. 63 in inflicting such curses is something other than the happy gleeful cheerful "delight" this verse says he takes in prospering other people.
And if you are really stupid and insist that this is just Moses speaking with typical semitic exaggeration, let me know the critiera you use to figure out which extremist statements in the bible are mere exaggeration and rhetoric.
The Psalms magnify God and extoll his goodness like no other book in the world. Are this book's extremist statements about God's eternal goodness also a case of mere Semitic exaggeration? If not, why not? Where is your sociological evidence that the only time ANE peoples exaggerated about their god, was when they were describing his wrath?
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